In the morning of 16 March 2015, Professor Sorel Reisman, Head of the International Multimedia Education Resource for Learning and Online Teaching Alliance (MERLOT) from California State University was invited to deliver a lecture on “Open Education Resources (OER): A New Challenge for Teaching & Research” in the conference center. SOU’s Vice President and more than 40 teaching faculty and staff attended the lecture. The lecture was organized by both the Engineering Technology Research Center on Open Distance Education and the Teacher Training Center, and was hosted by Dr. Xiao Jun, the Vice Director of the Information and Network Management Center.

During the lecture, Professor Sorel Reisman introduced the origin and development of OPEN. He then illustrated many different types of OPEN resources and discussed issues of quality of open materials. He also introduced some MERLOT projects in detail and described selected OERs and new projects on open education resources and services in California State University. After the lecture, the attendees communicated with Professor Sorel Reisman on topics such as MOOCs, Resource Sharing and Mechanisms of Teaching Resource Construction.

In the afternoon, Professor Sorel Reisman and the former Chairman of IEEE, Mr. John Walz, visited the Digital Lab of the Engineering Technology Research Center on Open Distance Education. The staff of the Digital Lab had a long discussion with the two experts and came to various agreements and intentions for cooperation.